Join in to celebrate the release of Raiford Guins’ video game history and preservation book GAME AFTER: A CULTURAL STUDY OF VIDEO GAME AFTERLIFE (MIT Press, 2014). Following a reading, Raiford will present on the mystery of the Atari Landfill and the recent excavation project in Alamogordo, NM, which he attended as an on-site expert.

Raiford Guins is an Associate Professor of Culture and Technology within the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University. Aside from almost ten years of writing on video game history and culture, Raiford has been a leading force in preserving the legacy of William A. Higinbotham and his 1958 analog computer game Tennis for Two. Additionally, Raiford is Founding Principal Editor with the Journal of Visual Culture.

Babycastles Gallery is an exhibition space for contemporary independent video games in New York.

Copies of Game After will be available for purchase. Follow @Sierra_Offline for event updates and previews.

This is a follow-up to the successful Debugging Game History panels at SCMS 2013.

The panel will be co-organized and co-chaired by Raiford Guins and Henry Lowood.

The panel theme is: Debugging Game History: Forgotten Histories. Each speaker on this panel will present on a key concept, player community, game developer, or topic. As with last year’s “Debugging” panels and the upcoming Debugging Game History volume, we would like each paper to be given a short title that focuses directly on the historical topic covered.

The goal is to underline participation in a coherent project with two aspects: (1) developing critical terminology in game studies; and (2) fostering a greater sense of inclusiveness in game studies by focusing on neglected or forgotten historical actors, designs, developers, companies, scenes, players, forms of documentation, etc. Some examples: “Arcade Art” “Clan PMS,” “Purple Moon,” “Jerry Lawson,” “Game Fanzines,” “Multiplayer Gaming before DOOM.” These examples are just intended to give a sense of breadth and the goals of the panel; we hope to get exciting proposals on any related topic. The panel might work best if the concepts are at least somewhat related; our suggestion to achieve this would be to focus on people (players, developers) or settings, but a more diverse set of contributions is fine, too.

Bottom line: The panel’s goal is to open up terminological discussion in critical-historical game studies and to break a path that opens up game studies to previously neglected histories.